My name is George Collins and I’m a general expeditor at the Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center.
Since elementary school, I have been interested in art. If I wasn’t playing sports, I would be sketching.
I could always draw, and when I was in school and did a painting, teachers would display it in my classroom or other classrooms. I had a gift.
My mom was a single mom. She told me, “Junior, your dad would go to the waterfront in Seattle and paint pictures. You got that talent from him.”
I didn’t go to school for it. I saw color and form in my head.
Before I began my career at the Postal Service, I served in the military. Before that, I painted.
I had two brothers who went to Vietnam, and they saw a lot of frightening stuff over there. Nobody comes back right after seeing and doing that stuff. I told them to come to the house and stay with me and my mom and my daughters.
I took care of them. We went back and forth to the Veterans Administration hospital a lot, so I wasn’t able to do my drawing and painting like I used to.
In the early 1980s I got sick with pneumococcal meningitis and then went into a coma for nine days. I don’t remember dates too well after that.
The P&DC recently displayed some paintings that I did 20 to 25 years ago. Until the paintings went on display, nobody knew about my artwork except for my family.
I got a heavy response from my co-workers, and I’m grateful for that.
“Off the Clock,” a column on Postal Service employees and their after-hours pursuits, appears regularly in Link.
